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AJMorton
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Why is Scotland practically bereft of Hill Forts in the map? There appears to be none in the west. My favourite camping sites are West coast Hill Forts. In 1999 I conducted a professional survey of at least three western forts and I have identified at least one which is currently unrecorded. It is huge, looks like an amphitheatre and may be another 'capital hill' like Dunadd.
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AJMorton
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Scotland has an uncountable number of Hill Forts, the most famous being Dunadd, Harpercroft, Wardlaw, Traprain Law, Castlelaw, (starting to see a pattern?), Bar or Barr, Barsalloch, Caisteal Muici, Kirkhill, Bennachee, Doorie Hill, An Tigh mor...
I think I had better get my books out and produce a map myself since Scotland is sorely neglected here.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Yes, the distribution of hillforts has an uncanny resemblance to the distribution of English-speakers. Though whether this is because they were a cultural feature of English-speakers or were only needed in areas where English-speakers preponderated, I canna sae.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Yes, the distribution of hillforts has an uncanny resemblance to the distribution of English-speakers. |
Quite the contrary, according to the map I posted from Hillforts of England and Wales.
From this and A.J. MacTesla's western Scottish forts, they appear to be concentrated in Celtland.
Frank is talking about major hillforts, meaning "big or important enough to be shown on a modern road map and be readily listed in sources such as Wikipedia". (If I understood Frank's claim, these are pretty much the ones that did not fall into disuse in the late BCs. This is disputed by MacTesla.)
It appears that word on the High Street has it that the distribution of hillforts has an uncanny resemblance to the distribution of English-speakers; which is an important matter for AE.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Actually the AE lesson that really stands out here is that the term "hill fort" is one that allows any School of Thought to flourish mightily. It is not so much that hill forts do not exist as that pretty much anything can be defined as a hill fort so long as nobody (else) is looking.
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New to the group I have not yet read all the submissions, but feel I can raise a query on hill forts.
I live within walking distance of Blunsdon hill fort, and not very far from Barbury Castle. Even Blunsdon, a minor fort compared with Barbury, is vast, many, many times bigger than any later Norman castle. Huge forces would be needed to defend it. One of the biggest is British Camp on the Malvern Hills and one might need a division to defend that. The usual explanation is that the defenders were armed with slingshots and one man could defend a large length of vallum. Using what as ammunition??? Okay where there are masses of water-worn pebbles, but surprisingly where those exist (south Birmingham) there are no forts.
What was their water supply?
If they were forts then Iron Age Britain was a horribly war-torn place to live, and I know of no other archaeological evidence to support that it was. Were these forts therefore status symbols, the English version of pyramids, indeed like later cathedrals.
If the Normans could control England from wooden castles, a hundreth the size of hill forts, why would anyone need a Barbury, except to show off?
I have read Mick's book and support almost all his conclusions. I had come to similar answers starting from the DNA evidence.
_________________
G W Gardiner
Author of Towards True Monetarism and The Evolution of Creditary Structures and Controls
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AJMorton
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Welcome Geoff. Your point here is similar to my own thoughts and I think you are spot on.
| Geoff Gardiner wrote: | | Were these forts therefore status symbols, the English version of pyramids, indeed like later cathedrals. |
The limitations and disadvantages of allowing yourself to be cooped up in a hill-top enclosure are too great to be taken seriously. Water, animals, expansion, ammo, etc...
My own reading of the Hill Fort land I last visited in Scotland suggested that the land outside the enclosure and down in the valley below was also heavily populated. At times the ramparts came down the side and formed small annexes. But in some areas it was open-plan.
I could of course be seeing two different periods but I think not.
Like you Geoff I see the hill fort as being a central official structure within a larger settlement.
The idea of stuffing the entire settlement inside the enclosure makes it sound like a self-imposed siege - only with no protagonist outside.
Welcome again Geoff. Nice one.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Were these forts therefore status symbols, the English version of pyramids, indeed like later cathedrals.
If the Normans could control England from wooden castles, a hundreth the size of hill forts, why would anyone need a Barbury, except to show off? |
I must have had a premonition of your post when I said
What if the hillforts were the equivalent of manor houses?
...I can't see anything that implies subsistence farming was going on around any hillfort I've been to.
...while defence may or may not have been a primary concern, ramparts of any size are certainly grand.
Pyramids and cathedrals go too far however: they are singular by comparison to the ubiquitous hillfort. Something so ordinary requires an ordinary explanation.
| I have read Mick's book and support almost all his conclusions. |
I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear about the ones you disagree with, on the Matters Arising thread.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear about the ones you disagree with, on the Matters Arising thread. |
No, I don't think we would.
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My disagreements with Mick's hypotheses are too tiny to bother with. I am much more concerned to show that the DNA and linguistic evidence supports him. Will do that on another thread.
There is one contrary point to my feeling about hill forts. We do know that Maiden Castle was defended against the Romans, and if I remember Sir Mortimer Wheeler correctly and he is right, the assault force numbered 20,000. There is archaeological evidence of that assault. Is there evidence of any other fort being defended against attack? I fear that we may find that no-one has looked to find out, breaching the basic rule of archaeology that if you do not look, you do not find.
There is debate about the use of Scottish Brochs too. I went to Shetland on an ACE study tour, led by Val Turner, the head of archaeology on Shetland (despite being English). As we looked at the Mousa broch she commented that she did not see how brochs could have been forts as there were no arrow slits. I suggested that they might be food stores, very necessary in the environment of the time. I have read that the oldest masonry buildings in the Near East were food stores. A broch would keep a bear out as well as people.
Does that help us with hill forts? Seems unlikely one would put one's cattle herd on the top of a hill? No water.
By the way, the public notices at Barbury Castle still talk about the Iron Age 'Celtic invasion'!!!! Do I commit an act of vandalism? The DNA evidence has caused the Celtomanes to relocate the Celts to Spain, reinterpreting the vague clues in Herodotus, and the Celtic invasion is now put back to 8,500 years ago when the people of R1b haplogroup left their Ice Ace refuge to move north. Sadly for Welsh nationalists that means they have to accept that 68 per cent of the English as well as 89 per cent of the Welsh are Celts, along with 90 per cent of the Basques who do not even speak an Indo-European language, let alone a Brythonic language. But then R1b is a male haplogroup, and children learn their mother's language.
Viel Spass.
_________________
G W Gardiner
Author of Towards True Monetarism and The Evolution of Creditary Structures and Controls
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| Is there evidence of any other fort being defended against attack |
I'm trying to get Hill forts into context in order to update my earlier map. Hogg did much work and published a comprehensive review in the book Hillforts of Britain around the 1970's. All 2000+ were apparently well defended but few have been fully dated. My take on the topic is that most were used for defence around 3-500BC and overwhelmed by invaders, with a few being reoccupied when the Romans arrived. But even so the archaeology presently is pretty vague.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Is there evidence of any other fort being defended against attack? I fear that we may find that no-one has looked to find out |
I'm pretty sure they have looked for little else. There are often sling stones and sometimes bodies in the ditches, as at Maiden Bower near here.
Makes you wonder why they date them to the Iron Age: can't remember any bits of iron weaponry! But, of course, that may well have been too precious to leave lying around. (Slings don't suddenly become ineffective just because there are metal edged weapons about.)
(This) Maiden Bower is one of many examples of hillforts remodelled from or on the site of an earlier "causewayed camp", which has to be anything but defensive. Something significant in economic life, though. And why shouldn't the "forts" be similar: markets or manor houses or courts or forums or...?
It seems to me impossible that they could be the main settlement type for the population at large; and very likely just the big nobs' houses. Whether the peasantry and/or their animals were allowed to take refuge there, they would still have been the targets when someone was being aggressive.
Some hillforts have clear evidence of buildings and 'streets' inside, others don't. Maybe some were effectively campsites for when the big nob was in town.
| Seems unlikely one would put one's cattle herd on the top of a hill? No water. |
Dewponds notwithstanding, I agree; but it would only have to be a temporary refuge, if at all.
While we've got agricultural uses of ditches-and-banks in mind, let's have a think about strip lynchets.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| There is debate about the use of Scottish Brochs too... As we looked at the Mousa broch she commented that she did not see how brochs could have been forts as there were no arrow slits. I suggested that they might be food stores, very necessary in the environment of the time. |
That may be part of the answer -- and a better one than the orthodox account -- but we need to look at "the phenomenon of brochs" rather than their individual features. There are zillions of them, all over the Shetlands, in particular, and much less so in the Orkneys and mainland. Is that right?
They can't have been fighting each other: they're too uniform and close together: no sign of opposing factions or continuous development. And they're on the water front rather than upland sites. They're not controlling strategic access to the interior coz there's nothing there to defend.
The towers are each part of a complex: a typical 'economic' installation again, whether a hamlet, a palace, an industrial estate, a school...
The food angle is a pretty good one, although if there were any troublesome bears, they would have been quickly exterminated. Last I heard, orthodoxy was bending over backwards to show that a self-sustaining arable life was possible in the Shetlands if they spread enough alkaline(?) sand on the acidic(?) soil; but it is only necessary to conjure up this (unevidenced) scenario if we think the broch people were agriculturally self-sufficient. They'd have to be bonkers. There is evidence of sheep farming: well, meat stays fresh while it's still alive. The rest could be brought in on a regular basis {Cf. remains of butchered, not whole, cattle in the Orkneys.}, so food stores would have been necessary, but not necessarily large, if the turnover was high.
Living and working there while being supplied from the mainland is a perfectly ordinary situation for a specialised economic centre: in the case of the Shetlands, the evidence says they were metal workers. All the brochs are on the sea front because they needed to get their supplies in and their trade goods out on a regular basis.
Maybe the towers are just plush pads for the incredibly wealthy. Maybe they're look-out posts for spotting ships and guiding them in to the workshop ready for an exchange. Maybe they're (impregnable) forts for mutual defence against plunderers. {Are arrows necessarily the best defence against ship-borne attackers when you can get a vantage point high above them?} Maybe they're all of the above. Whatever the explanation, we can count on it being ordinary.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| By the way, the public notices at Barbury Castle still talk about the Iron Age 'Celtic invasion'!!!! Do I commit an act of vandalism? |
I find the Celtic Invasion is so out of favour that it's hard to find what the evidence was that they interpreted as an invasion. Can you outline for us (perhaps on the Will the Real Cynesians Please Step Forward? thread) what does appear to have been happening in the early-to-mid first millennium BC? There must surely have been some basis for saying "this is when the Celts turned up".
You will see from that thread that, rather to my surprise, I do not share the current distaste for all things "Celtic".
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